Telecommunication networks provide for the transmission of information across some distance through terrestrial, wireless, and satellite communication networks. Such communications may involve voice, data, or multimedia information, among others. Typically, a user of the telecommunications network utilizes a communication device, such as a phone or computer, to transmit and receive one or more communications to and from another user of the network. Thus, the network provides any number of components interconnected in such a manner as to facilitate the transmission of communications between two or more users of the network. Stated differently, telecommunication networks comprise nodes, such as routers, switches, gateways, and other network components for transporting information.
As telecommunication networks and the interconnection of network nodes become increasingly complex, software-defined networking (SDN) architectures are deployed for simplifying network management and modification. Generally, network nodes provide data-forwarding functionality and management functionality. Stated differently, network nodes include management functionality for selecting a destination to send network traffic and data-forwarding functionality for forwarding the network traffic to the selected destination. SDN provides more flexibility to networks by decoupling a control plane (i.e., resource, routing, and other network management functionality) from a data plane (i.e., data-forwarding functionality) enabling network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted from applications and network services.
Generally, telecommunication providers are in communication with one or more customer networks to provide telecommunication services to users. While each of the customer networks may employ SDN to improve customization, optimization, and performance of the customer network by modifying forwarding policies for network traffic through the customer network, such modified forwarding policies are not applied to the telecommunication provider. As such, telecommunication providers often carry network traffic across their networks only to have the traffic discarded or modified once the traffic egresses from the telecommunication provider network into the customer network.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.